With my recent purchase of a 9000 series nVidia graphics card, I started thinking, has anyone investigated if nVidia's CUDA could be useful for lossless compression? I'm not even remotely close to being a programmer, so I haven't a clue how the code works, but it seems like CUDA is valuable for coding/decoding. I know nVidia is already holding a contest to speed up LAME (which ends in about 2 weeks), so perhaps it could be used to speed up lossless compressors? The fastest modes of several codecs are already blazing fast, approaching the limits of hard drives, but perhaps the high-compression modes could be sped-up through CUDA. Maybe, if the speed-up is enough, developers could even implement more ways to gain compression while still maintaining good encoding rates. It would be pretty cool if compression levels like La's best could be done at 50x or something.